I'm an undergradute student and am using the self esteem IAT in my study. I have completed testing and am currently having trouble analysing the data script. I have copied and pasted the results of trials 3,4,6&7 into an Excel file for all my participants as I found it difficult to read the columns in the inquisit file and there were a few pilot tests in amongst the data I wish to use and I don't want that data analysed-however is it possible to use the 'mail merge' procedure with SPSS suggested my on the IAT materials webpage using the excel file as it contains all of the same data minus the practice trials?

Which IAT script did you base your own from? If it was based on one of these samples, you can download the spss command file to analyze your IAT data. If all you need is the final D score, Inquisit 3 records the running D score for each trial. You can thus get each participant's final D score from the last row of their data in the column labeled values.d.

I'm sorry but for the life of me I cannot find the column labeled values.d on the attached .dat file. The script is based on the pictureiat one and I did not muck about with the captured values in any way. The running D score would certainly be of help!

You'll have to unzip the files to a folder on your computer, then copy your own picture files to that folder, and change the file names in the script to match the file names of your pictures. This script will record a running D score.

Is there a way to get Inquisit to write two data files for each experiment, one with ALL the data and one with just the participant's assigned number and their final D Score? Since I am running a batch file with three different experiments and n=500, combining all the data is likely to become difficult, to say the least.

After toying around with some ideas, I've come to the conclusion that currently this is not possible with Inquisit. Which leads me to another feature request:

The ability to define several <data> elements / output files with different specs in a single script. In addition, it would be nice to at least be able to seperately configure data output for <survey> and <expt> elements contained in a single script. I.e.: <data> lets you set the output format for the <expt> part, <surveydata> lets you do the same for the survey part. Currently this doesn't seem to be possible. Any thoughts, Sean? And as we're at it: Any thoughts on this, too?

Providing a means of customizing the data columns and format for survey data is an obvious one, and I've gotten other requests for this. This isn't trivial to add, but not a huge deal either. I had originally envisioned this as a command on the <survey> element, but putting it on the <surveypage> would allow you the flexibilty to specify the data for each page, which is nice. Likely, I'd put it on both. You would use the <survey> setting as a quick way to set the default for all pages, and if you wanted to override that default, you could do so on a given <surveypage>.

I've also been toying around with ways to easily record a single line of summary data (for example the D scores in the IAT) in addition to the raw reaction time data. My first thought is to create a new element called, for example, <summarydata> that looked similar to <data> but could appear multiple times in the script if multiple summaries were desired.